Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

My grandmother rubbed her arm. “I’ve written down a lot of testimony, and I’ve never used names,” she said. “What’s so important about names?”

“How can you tell a story without names?” I said. “I don’t care if it’s a real name or a fake name. All this ‘he’ and ‘her’ and ‘him.’” Chinese didn’t have gendered pronouns, just ta for all occasions. “It’s confusing.”

“Some people, I don’t know their names.”

“That’s fine, but the people you do know, they don’t know you’re saying their names.”

“That’s individual philosophy,” my grandmother said. “I just don’t like doing it. It’s not virtuous.”

“I know, I know. You don’t want to gossip.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a Christian.”

“It’s not a matter of being Christian,” I said. “I know you only want to say good things about people. You don’t want to say bad things.”

“Even the good things, I’m not going to use names.”

I took a deep breath. “Why?”

“It’s in the Bible. Don’t tell other people’s secrets.”

“But there are names in the Bible! And there are tons of bad stories about people, with names.”

“Yes, there are names in the Bible, but it also teaches us how to act,” my grandmother said. I thought I caught her smirking. “The Bible teaches us not to leak other people’s secrets. Of course, you haven’t read as much of the Bible as I have.”

“Okay,” I said, knowing I was about to pass a point from which it would be difficult to return. “I don’t think I want to hear any more of your stories.”

“Fine. Don’t listen. I have my own ways of doing things.”

THE WINTER IN Shanghai was overcast, cold, and wet. The Chinese didn’t employ radiant heating systems south of the Yangtze, relying instead on inefficient forced-air appliances that were easily overwhelmed by the damp chill. It didn’t help that the ayi, in her endless pursuit of fresh air, left the windows open every time she came to clean. The sun set before I left the office. I had not spoken to my grandmother since our argument.

One dark evening Richard informed Andrew and me that we had plans. He was having dinner with government officials, whose children were attending schools abroad and didn’t have much in common with local Chinese anymore. He offered Andrew and me to entertain them. “Goddamn, I hate having to preen for Communists,” Andrew complained. “At least dinner will be good. They eat well.”

In the car on the way to dinner, Andrew mentioned that the head of the Communist Party of Shanghai and other high-ranking officials had just been sacked for accepting bribes, abusing their power, and siphoning nearly half a billion dollars from the city’s pension fund. Most people expected the ousted party chief to be executed or, as Andrew put it, given “a nine-gram headache.”

I was still paranoid about my visa snafu and a brief stint giving English lessons to two men from the “public safety” department, which I was convinced were related. A few China-based reporters whom I had befriended told me that they were regularly called in for unannounced meetings with government honchos to discuss their work. They assumed that their phones were tapped and that they were being followed. But they said I probably had nothing to fear. The worst thing that could happen to me was being called an unpatriotic Chinese and told to leave the country. Besides, they said, being Richard’s nephew was pretty good protection.

Even so, I hoped to keep a low profile. “Can you do me a favor?” I asked Richard. “Can you just tell them I taught English literature when I was in the States? Don’t tell them I worked for newspapers or what I’m trying to do here with the porcelain.”

“Sure, sure.”

We met the officials at a Chinese restaurant in a shady quarter of the French Concession. Most of the diners wore the telltale signs of nouveau riche party cadres: ill-fitting suits of shiny material, garish belt buckles, cheap-looking leather loafers, and the ubiquitous designer man-purses slung over their shoulders. A four-foot-tall shark fin in a glass case rose prominently from the middle of the floor. A middle-aged man with dyed hair and stained teeth greeted us. This was Speaker Hu, head of the People’s Congress of Shanghai and one of the highest-ranking officials in the city. Speaker Hu had been in charge of Pudong when Richard started his company, and he remained an important ally in the local government. They met for dinner a couple times every year.

Already at the table were two other couples and their daughters. One of the husbands was the head of the government-run venture capital firm that was heavily invested in Richard’s company. The servers made a big show of setting out dishes of cold appetizers on the lazy Susan. Speaker Hu made formal introductions of the two couples and their daughters. One of the daughters, Bonny, worked for the British Council in Shanghai. She had gone to the top college in Shanghai and completed postgraduate studies in London.

Richard went around the table and gave short biographies for Andrew and me, trying to impress with our educational and work backgrounds. “He was a journalist in the States,” he said of me. “And he’s doing research on a project now.”

I sank into my chair, but Speaker Hu and his friends seemed more interested in whether I was married. Richard told them I didn’t speak Chinese very well but was learning— typical ABC, he said, as everyone nodded knowingly—while I concentrated on the food. Richard updated Speaker Hu on the company, and the conversation took place mostly over my head. As part of the youngest generation at the table, I was not expected to speak unless spoken to, a return to the boring, endless dinner parties of my childhood where I spent the whole time wondering if there would be dessert.

Then Speaker Hu asked Andrew about his impressions of China. Without hesitating, Andrew rattled off a long list of China’s problems. “And I think China really needs to improve two major things, the pollution and the health care,” he continued.

I considered tackling Andrew to get him to stop talking. I had seen the inside of a Chinese police station before, when I accompanied a non-Chinese-speaking friend to report a stolen purse. The officer in charge led us through a dark row of subterranean jail cells to a dingy questioning room with a single, barred window high above our heads, where he took down my friend’s statement. The room was empty except for a couple of metal chairs and four scarred wooden tables that had been pushed together to form a larger one that would have been just the right size on which to lay a person. Every single inch of the grimy walls between the floor and eye level was gashed or splattered with dark stains or the kind of streaks that result from flailing legs or missed kicks.

Andrew mentioned an incident during a departmental trip to Huangshan, one of China’s most famous mountains and known to me as a shooting location for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when one of the company’s vice-presidents suffered a heart attack on the peak. Members of the tour group called an ambulance, but its drivers refused to budge until they received 40,000 RMB (about $6,000) in cash, far more than what the employees had on them. The drivers were unmoved by the group’s pleas and promises that they were good for the money as soon as they reached a cash machine in town. Fortunately the tour guide managed to borrow the difference and got the vice-president to the hospital.

“Was that in Shanghai?” Speaker Hu asked. He spoke with a nicotine-laced growl. I wondered if we would get nine-gram headaches, too. “I can’t believe it happened in Shanghai.”